Anna is a ten year old girl who wakes up in limbo with very few memories of her lived experiences. Limbo is represented as a Waiting Room for spirits. She is trapped in there for a few months.
The Waiting Room is occasionally curated by groups of Demons bringing through other spirits and entities to the other side. She tries to get their attention, but the only person to ever respond is the demon Soal Storge.
Anna, astrologically Cancer, is guided by water and the
moon. She is an Empath, meaning she uncontrollably feels what other people feel.
Soal,
astrologically Aries, is guided by fire and Mars. These are also indicative of
feminine and masculine qualities. I have
my qualms with astrology irl, but it makes for cool symbolism and studying it
in terms of the project is fun.
Soal reveals to Anna that she’s been trapped in the Waiting Room, unable to be sorted like the rest of the
spirits, because she never died. Something has happened to sever her spirit from her body. He suggests she has a body somewhere, and that he’ll help her find it if they make a blood contract.
After they make the contract, he makes a Totem out of his spit, his blood, and both of their hair and uses magic to bind her spirit to the Totem. The Totem takes the shape of her human form.
They cross a river and come to a technology called a Teleportation Phaser. Phasers are a common method of travel created by the premier engineering conglomerate Charles Corp.
I like to think of Anna as the Calvin to Soal’s Hobbes.
Soal leads them first to a small town to find his friend Marla and get Marla to go to his house and watch his pets. In this town Anna sees bounty posters detailing a villain called The Mechromancer, whose insignia is a sugar skull.
She learns that The Mechromancer has been kidnapping children with a giant
robot.
They decide it’s a good lead to follow. They learn rumors place him far in the south, south of a community called Santa Rojo, and decide to travel to the next city where they use the Phaser.
They have to hike through a forest for a few days on their way to that town and they come across the monster Gemini- Maggie and Mayhem- a conjoined twin and old friends of Soal’s who have been hired to bring Anna back to the Waiting Room.
We learn that magic can be cast using blood sacrifice, but truly creative people can just intend spells into reality- usually through some form of creative expression. Maggie is a spell caster where Mayhem is a warrior. Maggie casts a guilt hex on Anna, but they get away.
Soal changes course from Santa Rojo to the east, to San Ayong, where a healer named Lorna lives.
Soal knows she can lift Gemini’s hex. While they travel, the guilt manifests itself in weird, uncomfortable physical ways. Uncontrollable magic guilt mixed with uncontrollable empathy make for a strange and dangerous combination. Along the way to San Ayong, being impacted by the hex, we learn Anna has immense feelings of guilt toward something that happened with her mother while she was alive.
When they finally get to San Ayong, Lorna cares for Anna in a very maternal and loving way. They make food together, clean together; Lorna gives Anna a bath etc. Lorna encourages Soal and Anna to take up meditation so as to keep the effects of the hex at bay. They are waiting for Lorna’s friend Kaelen, a cleric, to come and help perform the ritual to lift the hex.
to be continued...
